What Science Says About Diversity (2nd half)

(Continued)

What Science Says About Diversity (Part II)

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, December 2007


Sigmund Freud founded virtually all of psychotherapy on introspection and self-analysis, so one would expect him to be able to explain his own feelings, no matter how unquantifiable or primitive. In one area, however, he baffled himself; he could not explain group loyalty. He wrote that he was “irresistibly” bonded to Jews and Jewishness, by “many obscure and emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as by a clear consciousness of inner identity, a deep realization of sharing the same psychic structure.” Freud was writing before the days of genetic similarity theory, but he was describing what would now be called kinship bonds.

Perhaps he was right to say that the more powerful these bonds are the less they can be expressed in words. They are the feelings of artists and fanatics—and of ordinary people—but they do not lend themselves to precise analysis. By refusing to take seriously that which they cannot analyze, social scientists misread how real societies function.

Prof. Connor defined a nation as “the largest group that can command a person’s loyalty because of felt kinship ties; it is, from this perspective, the fully extended family.” Families are built on the most primitive emotions; genetic bonds tie them together. By likening race, nation, or ethnicity to “the fully extended family,” Prof. Connor captured some of its power. As Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster at Coleraine has noted, “[ethnic] conflicts have defied explanation by the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and economics . … [G]enetic similarity theory represents a major advance in the understanding of these conflicts.”

It also helps explain changes in international borders. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia all split into ethnic nations. Cyprus has been essentially divided into Greek and Turkish enclaves. The Flemings want independence from the Walloons of Belgium as do the French-speaking Quebeckers from English-speaking Canada. There are innumerable conflicts—in Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Tibet, Iraq, Sudan—that reflect the desires of people to govern themselves, to celebrate their own heritage and culture, to live within smaller boundaries where they can remain among their own people.

Those rare cases of merger rather than division are driven by the same ethnic passions. Reunification of the two Germanys and Vietnams demonstrated the power of common blood. Within the two Koreas, there is a similarly deep yearning for union that will no doubt be satisfied when the aberrant regime in the north collapses.

Many people profess to believe that diversity—whether of race, language, or ethnicity—is a great advantage for a country. So many people say they believe this that one would expect this view to be buttressed by extensive social science research. It is not. The preceding summary (including Part I, which appeared in the previous issue) is not a selective account only of research that discredits diversity. There simply is no research that suggests diversity increases community cohesiveness, that the brain ignores race, or that diverse countries are happier and more peaceful than homogeneous ones. Praise for diversity is often nothing more than an unsupported assertion of its benefits.

As we have seen, in the United States both businesses and universities insist that a mix of races, religions, ethnicities, etc., is a huge boost to productivity and learning, but there is little evidence for this.

Thomas A. Kochan, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has probably studied corporate diversity more extensively than anyone. His conclusion after a five-year study? “The diversity industry is built on sand.” Prof. Kochan initially contacted 20 major companies that have publicly committed themselves to diversity, and was astonished to find that not one had done a serious study of how diversity increased profits. He learned that managers are afraid that race-related research could bring on lawsuits, but that another reason they do not look for results is “because people simply want to believe that diversity works.”

Like other researchers, he noted “the negative consequences of diversity, such as higher turnover and greater conflict in the workplace,” and concluded that even if the best managers were able to overcome these problems there was no evidence diversity leads to greater profits. “The business case rhetoric for diversity is simply naive and overdone,” he says, noting that the estimated $8 billion a year spent on diversity training does not even protect businesses from discrimination suits, much less boost profits.

What about campus diversity? Attempts to measure its advantages are few and disappointing. Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte used data from the National Center for Education Statistics to determine the correlation between student satisfaction with their education and the number of blacks on campus. Their findings: “As the proportion of black students rose, student satisfaction with their university experience dropped, as did their assessments of the quality of their education and the work ethic of their peers. In addition, the higher the enrollment diversity, the more likely students were to say that they personally experienced discrimination.” A greater mix of minorities is at least believed to make black students feel more comfortable, but the authors found that even this is uncertain: “Diversity appears to increase complaints of unfair treatment among white students without reducing them among black students.”

When scholars do not merely assert that diversity is an advantage but try to explain why it is so, their arguments are surprisingly weak. Let us return to Robert Putnam of Harvard. His main argument in favor of diversity was to say that large numbers of ethnic Europeans immigrated to a largely-WASP United States around the turn of the 20th century, and assimilated successfully. This is not a defense or a celebration of diversity. After several generations, Poles, Irishmen, and Italians became largely indistinguishable from WASPs, not just in language, but in earnings, education, and likelihood of marrying outside their ancestral group (Jews retained greater distinctiveness, but moved in the same direction). The newcomers became like the majority, and diversity largely disappeared. It disappeared because it was a source of tension and conflict, not a source of strength.

The experience of the European ethnics highlights the importance of race, which several studies cited above have found to be the most difficult social barrier to overcome. While whites were becoming essentially indistinguishable from each other, two non-white racial groups that had been in America far longer than the immigrants—Indians and blacks—were not assimilating. To this day, they maintain distinct identities.

The scientific evidence is clear: Human beings have deep-rooted tribal instincts. They prefer to live in homogeneous communities. Societies with distinct racial and ethnic populations suffer from conflicts from which homogenous ones are spared. There are intellectuals and bohemians who defy these instincts and enjoy diversity, but they are a minority. Why do Americans (and others) persist in claiming that diversity is a great advantage?

Why Deny the Obvious?

There are several reasons. In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a defect to be endured. Americans hoped that race relations were entering a new era, in which people of different races would learn from and cooperate with each other.

It was appealing to think our country was embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, religions, and empires. Many Americans firmly believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a higher realm of human possibility.

After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to vast numbers of non-Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s could have imagined. Diversity lead to conflict more often than to harmony, but it would have been a repudiation not only of our new immigration policy but of the civil rights ideals of the 1950s and 1960s to state the obvious: that diversity causes serious problems.

Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it has made a grave mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, some people began to deny what was happening, or at least to hope that with enough exhortations to “celebrate diversity,” an increasingly serious disadvantage could be transformed into a benefit.

At the same time, in a society in which “racism” was becoming a virtually unforgivable crime, to draw unfavorable conclusions about diversity was sure to lead to charges of “racism.” It became common to say not only that diversity was our strength but that it was our greatest strength—something that was obviously not true and that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s.

Some groups had an obvious interest in claiming that diversity was a strength: immigrants and non-whites. It was they, after all, who provided the diversity, and they took immediately to the idea that their presence was a priceless gift to the country. There is breath-taking arrogance in this view—that the United States was lifeless and incomplete before Hispanics or Asians came—but it is not unusual for recent immigrants to explain to the descendants of old stock Americans that diversity is central to our identity.

At the same time, it became nearly impossible for the presumed beneficiaries of diversity to decline the gift. To admit that diversity is a source of tension was, in effect, to look a black man or an immigrant in the face and say, “The country would be better off with fewer people like you.” Even if our society did not “celebrate diversity,” this would be appalling manners. In a country in which every pillar of society agreed that diversity was a great gift, it came to be seen as reprehensible.

By the turn of the 21st century, therefore, something that was very doubtful and certainly unproven had become unassailable doctrine. The mantra of diversity was so widely repeated that professors and business executives repeated it in the teeth of the evidence. Robert Putnam at first disbelieved his findings and then feared to publish them. Xerox and Chrysler, who otherwise do their sums with very sharp pencils, poured resources and moral energy into fruitless programs they dared not even evaluate. This is the kind of behavior we associate with divination and astrology.

The national commitment to diversity is now so great that to point out its weaknesses is an act of subversion. Many people are incapable even of facing the evidence, much less of making a psychological break with orthodoxy and accepting it. In all fairness, it is not hard to understand why. To renounce what has become virtually the state religion is to face a hideous possibility: that the United States has been hurtling down the wrong path for half a century.

Humans have a deep yearning to believe that their leaders act wisely, that the institutions of their society are good, that their country has a bright future. Many are unable to believe that so many leaders and prominent figures can have been mistaken.

J.B.S. Haldane noted with a smile that there are four stages new ideas go through before they are accepted: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so. The realization that diversity is not a strength is somewhere between stages one and two, but the evidence for it is so overwhelming that it will eventually reach stage four.

When that happens, all Western societies will have to answer questions that many now find too terrifying to face: If diversity is a weakness, and all our efforts to increase it have been a mistake, what do we do now? Can diversity be reversed? If so, how? Can it be reversed humanely? Or must we simply carry on, but more humbly and with fewer illusions?

The longer we wait before dealing sensibly with these questions, the fewer choices we will have.

[Read Part I here.]


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